I try to listen to artists that I am not familiar with for this site. There is something about finding someone new that can be a uniquely pleasurable experience. You get to hear sounds from all over the country and world, with drastically different styles and compositions, connected together with some common threads. And it keeps you from having to read the same review that you can find on any other review website in the world. As you can imagine, this quest to find artists that I like can be a bit of a crap shoot. Sometimes you find someone great (Mick Jenkins’ The Healing Componentis an excellent recent example), but sometimes you find someone bad (I’m talking about you Futuristic). And then there are artists like IshDARR, who lie somewhere in the middle.

1992 was a hell of a year, and rapper The Game remembers it well. Embers of unrest were fanned by the savage beating of Rodney King by four police office, and the entire city of Los Angeles burst into violence after their acquittal. It was like a bonfire erupting. Six days. One billion in damages. 55 dead. 2000 wounded. The National Guard, Army, and Marines had to be deployed to finally quell the riots. It wasn’t a pretty time and it did a huge amount of damage to relations between the people and the police. It’s remembered every day in communities across the country. The Game watched looting and violence as he stood in the rift between red and blue, Crip and Blood, vying for control.

Saccharine sweet bubblegum pop. Daya’s album is nothing you haven’t heard before if you’ve turned on a radio in the last ten years. Yet at the same time that she exists firmly within the realm of generic pop music, the relentlessly positive anthems hit good notes to make some good, if forgettable pop songs. I couldn’t help but find myself singing along, even if the lyrics were a bit cheesy.

Dave East wants you to pay attention to him. His debut album Kairi Chanel, named after his newborn daughter, seeks to establish his place in the pantheon of popular rappers. He goes hard in the tried and true style of New York rappers and wants you to know how real he is. He isn’t some faker bragging about imaginary accomplishments, or a studio pusher. He weaves bars through tales of dealing drugs, easy women, and the rough life of a true New York hustler. A subdued beat thumps along in the background. It doesn’t overpower his voice, but it proves a suitable backdrop to let his bars shine through as his gruff voice weaves a tale of violence across the Big Apple.

It is rare to see a game that allows its players to play together on the same system. The days of couch co-op are long past. It is even rarer to see a game that practically demands it. Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, which sounds like something equal parts 1950’s science fiction and pulp romance novel, begs you to play with someone else. Together. Playing alone, this game is good, albeit a little frustrating at times, as you and your space pet, a relentlessly happy fur ball of a cat or dog, battle your way through a bleak but colorful space full of enemies and environmental hazards. They stand between you and saving your tiny friends and fighting back the anti-love that is threatening the universe.

Love is a powerful force. Tackling it is a difficult proposition, but that does not stop Mick Jenkins from trying to talk about what makes love, how we love, and why we should love in his debut album The Healing Component. For a first venture, it is an ambitious one, as he delivers a high concept album on how love has the ability to drastically effect a life. To him, love is The Healing Component, and through an application of loving each other, and a fair amount marijuana, he thinks we can all become better people. He builds this idea through conversations broken up and peppered throughout the album in which we learn more about his idea of love and his experiences with it as a young woman interviews him. “Have you ever loved someone differently?” she asks, calling up vivid memories from him, and from the listener as they work their way through what love really is.

Deus Ex does its best to raise interesting questions about morality, humanity, and authority in its newest installment. Back in the shoes of Adam Jensen, you work as an agent of a secret government task force that tackles terrorism. Since the end of Human Revolution and The Aug Incident, augmented people have experienced systematic oppression and injustice, and a group has sprung out of the anger that it has caused. The Augmented Rights Coalition (ARC) is suspected of bombing a train station and you must investigate, while at the same time attempting to find out what happened to you in the aftermath of the incident on Panchaea. Someone tinkered with your augs, unlocking powerful new abilities of you to play with, on top of the same compliment of powers from the previous game that you are already familiar with.